The Brooklyn Rail

Why should I think your world is great
when I already live differently? ¹

It is as difficult to separate beauty and the female in Western culture as it is nature and the thoughtless.

Woman and nature are also closely associated, and both remain as underestimated as each other. For historical reasons, this is especially so following conventional logic.

It’s not exactly logic that’s the problem; rather it’s the way logic is used conventionally.

But humans are a thousand tiny selves, to adapt Deleuze’s “thousand tiny sexes,”² and we/they don’t all point in the same direction, or indeed “same-different” direction. But we/they may, some of the time. We/they coincide in passing, and then move on.

There is a profound unbalance (sic) in dualism that is very hard to see. You have to go back a long, long way in dominant cultural histories to reach the moment when dual balance is exact, affording, and a glimpse beyond.³ But once it is seen, it changes everything, because It’s mobile. You can’t hold it.

This is what kept Picasso returning to Manet especially in his last years. Sure, all kinds of spatiality have been explored since the nineteenth century, but, apart from the emphatically non-figurative Barnett Newman, not prominently in this specific, apparently tight, focus. It gives way, or points the way, towards the dissolution of dualism. Only Manet has explored it in the round of contemporaneity: psychologically, fashionably, physically, in urban, natural and interior space.⁴

Kate McCrickard’s ⁵ art concerns the figure in space in the figure (sic; keep repeating!). Take Dragueurs (2023): to whom does the central arm/white shape belong? You can’t decide. And anyway, it’s equally about colour and line. The three green areas, the reds and the near-blacks all work almost—but not quite—centrifugally.

The vertical green shape surely ends in a thumb, especially as it satisfyingly forms a bracket with the red thumb round the pearly bracelet. Like the white arm it (perhaps) grasps, it is and isn’t central.

What sex are these urban figures? Recalling the nineteenth century Parisian types that established the modernist flâneur, but dedifferentiated in ways he was not. “Dragueur” is slang for a male seducer; “draguer” is usually to chat up a girl, but in English it applies regardless. It also means a dredger; the connotation is deliberate.

The image overall has a beauty of line and colour that yet draws you to the grotesque, as with Toulouse-Lautrec. The same goes for their intensity.

There is a further aspect to this in Prostitute with Two Cancelled White Men (2022). If you didn’t know the title, it could easily be seen to depict three strange men, equals. But perhaps it does! In that case, who is the prostitute?

What extraordinary possibilities are suggested by the idea of a “cancelled” white man! On the left is a skull or a mask, with perhaps the suggestion of gray hair and yellowing beard; on the right, a flat-headed person, large-bodied, young and yellow; and in the middle, an indeterminate white-shirted person.

None of them is unequivocally sexed or necessarily white. And look at those hands! As in Dragueurs, it is as difficult to assign all of them to one specific figure as it is to determine the gazes. Why are the yellow hands only four-fingered? Whose hand is in the middle? Which hands cast those flat black shadows that, in the abstract, balance the dark hair of the white, near-central figure? Does the physical closeness of the figures on the left imply that they are the cancelled white men?

Yet they all convey the same presence while suggesting varying sexual identification and racial origins.

In neither of the above paintings can you assign a point of view to the figures. The much-discussed male “gaze” is absent. There is no bearer of the truth. The location of truth is why art is essential; and why art changes, while remaining true.

Urbanization and elements of modernity such as rapid travel greatly contribute to distorting truths, myths and legends. The results especially obscure nature, the female, and the logics of art because (to condense complex arguments) technology derives from the dominant, which has been Western, male and white for a very long time. (Pick your starting-point: Plato, Hobbes, Henry VIII, or…?).

All this implicitly assumes that truth depends on a single line of sight, the linear perspective of the European Renaissance. It is hierarchical and entails the loss of the multi-directional. Linear “science” that has become increasingly difficult to justify.

Go back far enough in the etymology of the word “science” and you see it derives from “to divide.”

Penny Florence (D.Phil, University of York, UK) is an inter/cross/anti-disciplinarian, a digital and visual poet, artist (member of the NSA) and Professor Emerita at The Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. Formerly Professor and Chair of Department at Falmouth University, UK and at Art Center Collage of Design, USA, she has also spent many years free of institutions. Her most recent curatorial project is The World as Yet Unseen (with Clare Cooper of Art First), and her most recent book is Thinking The Sculpture Garden (Routledge, 2020). She loathes the indispensability of “-isms,” but is a feminist.

1. Pourquoi m’estasier dans ton monde alors que, déjà,je vis ailleurs? Luce Irigaray 1982 41, loosely translated by me. My title derives from Hildegard of Bingen: It is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech. (12th century).
2. The phrase is Deleuze’s, filtered through Elizabeth Grosz’s 1993 essay on Feminism and Rhizomatics, Topoi 12, 167–179 (1993).
3. Some threatened and minority forest cultures may be exceptions.
4. I know, it’s a huge claim. Given the space, I’d defend it.
5. Kate McCrickard is a distinguished art writer and international exhibitor (e.g. Art in Print (USA), Tate Modern, The Royal Scottish Academy & Art South Africa. International exhibitions, see. https://www.katemccrickard.com/. Her latest solo show 2023: London’s Art First, (https://www.artfirst.co.uk/). See online catalogue https://www.artfirst.co.uk/ebooks/kate-mccrickard/new-romantics/index.html#p=1